Headhunters
Roger Brown is the most successful corporate headhunter in Oslo and a 5-foot-6 art thief on the side, robbing the homes of the executives he interviews to fund his Frogner-district mansion and the wife he is convinced will leave him if the cash dries up. He picks Clas Greve, a charismatic Dutch tech-company heir who claims to own a Rubens, and the burglary turns sideways when Roger discovers Greve is a former Special Forces tracker hunting him across Norway. Nesbo wrote the book in 2008 as a standalone between Harry Hole novels, and it became one of the few Nordic-noir thrillers of the decade that worked as a tight single-volume escalation rather than a series entry.
What you might want to know about Headhunters
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Norwegian corporate headhunter and part-time art thief picks the wrong mark, a former special-forces tracker, in Jo Nesbo's standalone Nordic noir thriller.
Headhunters is a standalone novel by Jo Nesbo, separate from his Harry Hole detective series. Nesbo has written multiple standalones alongside the Harry Hole books.
Yes. A 2011 Norwegian film adaptation directed by Morten Tyldum was released internationally and is widely considered one of the strongest Nordic crime adaptations of the era.
Headhunters was written by Jo Nesbo, published in 2009 by Vintage Canada.
Headhunters is 265 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Headhunters takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Headhunters is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.